High School As Emotional Stasis

Read Time:5 Minute, 22 Second

MOVIE REVIEWS
This is Not a Test
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Genre: Horror
Year Released: 2025
Runtime: 1h 42m
Director(s): Adam MacDonald
Writer(s): Adam MacDonald, Courtney Summers
Cast: Olivia Holt, Froy Gutierrez, Luke Macfarlane, Corteon Moore, Chloe Avakian, Carson MacCormac
Where to Watch: exclusively in theaters February 20, 2026

RAVING REVIEW: What does it mean to survive when you don’t actually want to be alive? That question sits at the center of THIS IS NOT A TEST, and Adam MacDonald never lets it drift into metaphor or genre shorthand. Instead, he locks it inside a high school, seals the exits, and forces the audience to sit with a protagonist who experiences the apocalypse less as a threat than an inconvenience to her desire to disappear.

Adapted from Courtney Summers’ novel, the film makes a decisive choice early on. This isn’t a zombie movie interested in logistics, body counts, or even chaos. The infected are present, dangerous, and persistent, but they’re never the real antagonist. The real tension comes from emotional inertia, from a central character who isn’t motivated by survival instinct and has no interest in becoming a hero just because the world is ending.

Olivia Holt’s performance as Sloane is the film’s focus and its greatest strength. She plays the role with a restraint that refuses sympathy. This isn’t a sanitized or inspirational portrayal of depression. Sloane isn’t waiting to rediscover her will to live, and she isn’t secretly longing for connection in a way that can be unlocked by circumstance. Holt allows long stretches of stillness and emotional disengagement to dominate the screen, trusting the audience to understand that numbness itself is the point. It’s a risky performance, but it’s the right one for this material.

MacDonald’s direction mirrors that emotional stasis. The camera rarely searches for urgency. Scenes linger longer than expectations suggest they should, and the pacing is deliberately uneven. Conversations stretch; silences are allowed to breathe; moments that would typically escalate into action stall. This approach won’t work for every viewer, especially those expecting a more traditional outbreak storyline, but it reinforces the film’s commitment. The apocalypse doesn’t automatically create purpose. Sometimes it just removes excuses.

The high school setting is used less as a nostalgic or ironic backdrop and more as a space of fixation. These characters are trapped not just physically, but emotionally, caught between adolescence and adulthood with no roadmap forward. The script wisely avoids turning the group into archetypes. Even when certain characters drift toward familiar genre roles, MacDonald resists giving them the expected arcs or transformations. People remain frustrating, inconsistent, and incomplete, which feels far more honest in our world.

Luke Macfarlane’s presence adds a layer of unexpected significance. His role isn’t designed to dominate the narrative, but his calm, measured energy contrasts sharply with the younger cast’s volatility. He functions less as a source of authority and more as a reminder of adulthood’s own limitations, reinforcing the idea that survival alone doesn’t equal resolution.

Where THIS IS NOT A TEST occasionally stumbles is in its balance between horror and danger. Some parts of the story involving secondary antagonism feel underdeveloped, not because they lack impact, but because the film seems unsure how much emphasis to give them. At times, the narrative tension dilutes, and the momentum slows more than it needs to. This isn’t about pacing in a generic sense, but about narrative pressure.

The film’s refusal to offer ablution is also its most admirable quality. There’s no triumphant shift where everything clicks into place. The ending doesn’t resolve Sloane’s internal conflict so much as acknowledge it. As an adaptation, THIS IS NOT A TEST succeeds by understanding that fidelity isn’t about replication. MacDonald treats Summers’ novel as a thematic foundation rather than a checklist. The film translates the book’s emotional core into cinematic language, using space, silence, and performance instead of internal monologue. It won’t replace the novel, but it doesn’t try to. It stands as its own interpretation, shaped by restraint rather than embellishment.

THIS IS NOT A TEST won’t satisfy viewers looking for a conventional zombie experience, and it isn’t interested in winning over skeptics through shock or novelty. It’s a film about emotional paralysis set against the backdrop of collapse, and it commits to that idea even when it risks alienating its audience. That commitment gives it weight, even when its structure wavers. Taking the zombie genre and using it as a backdrop for something far deeper isn’t necessarily new, but this was done with intent and class in a way I haven’t seen before.

In a genre crowded with escalation and excess, THIS IS NOT A TEST chooses subtraction. It strips the apocalypse down to its quietest, most uncomfortable implications, and asks whether survival means anything without desire. It doesn’t pretend to have an answer, but it asks the question with honesty, and that’s enough to make it linger.

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[photo courtesy of IFC INDEPENDENT FILM COMPANY, SHUDDER]

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